Art Taaalkssss: Staci Bu Shea

Utrecht-based curator, writer and death doula Staci Bu Shea convenes with others over aesthetic, critical, and poetic practices of social reproduction and care work, as well as their manifestations in relationships, daily life, community organizing, and institutional practice. This effort finds its form through text, collaborations, presentations, workshops, exhibitions, and other facilitated encounters within the field of art and culture. Intermingled with their art-filled life is their death-led and service-oriented care practice as a death doula. At the heart of these converging life/work practices lies their commitment to cultivating aesthesia (the capacity to feel or perceive) to help us turn toward the truth of life and death to honor what we love and what brings us meaning, through and because of both our joy and pain.  
 
Reflecting on their recently published book Solution 305: Dying Livingly, Bu Shea will share more about their practice and encounters in conversation with Ingo Niermann. They will talk about ways in which beginning a deathcare practice can help exercise and strengthen our sensitivity toward what we value, and where fear and anxiety around death and grief become invitations toward compassion and connection. 

 
 
Staci Bu Shea is the author of Solution 305: Dying Livingly, part of the Solution Series edited by Ingo Niermann and published by Sternberg Press in 2025. Recently they co-taught the workshop Access Test Kitchen with Mira Thompson for Studium Generale Rietveld Academie, and curated The Sphinx’s Riddle public program at Manifold Books in Amsterdam. Bu Shea was curator at Casco Art Institute of Working for the Commons in Utrecht, and co-curator of Barbara Hammer: Evidentiary Bodies at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York. 
 
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